5 Broken Cameras

Mr. Burnat’s son Gibreel looks out on an Israeli settlement.Credit
Kino Lorber Films

“5 Broken Cameras” provides a grim reminder — just in case you needed one — of the bitter intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A chronicle of protest and endurance, punctuated by violence and tiny glimmers of hope, this documentary is unlikely to persuade anyone with a hardened view of the issue to think again. For anyone who retains an interest in the human contours of the situation, however, the movie is necessary, if difficult, viewing.

For while it is hardly neutral — presenting an extended, highly personal view of life in a West Bank village adjacent to Israel’s controversial security fence — “5 Broken Cameras” is much more than yet another polemical bulletin from an embattled region. It may seem perverse to praise an eyewitness account of political trauma for its formal accomplishments, but for a project like this to claim the attention of an audience it has to justify itself as cinema. There is no shortage of information and opinion about the Middle East, and this film, made collaboratively by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, is partly a piece of advocacy journalism. But it is also a visual essay in autobiography and, as such, a modest, rigorous and moving work of art.

Mr. Burnat, a Palestinian farmer in the tiny town of Bilin, was given his first camera in 2005, when his youngest son, Gibreel, was born. Almost simultaneously, the Israeli Army began building a barrier between Bilin and a nearby Jewish settlement.

The residents of Bilin, outraged as their olive groves were bulldozed by the military and burned by settlers, organized weekly protests, attended by left-wing Israelis and sympathizers from other countries. In 2007 the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the barrier rerouted, and four years later, after village access to some of the land was restored, the demonstrations were called off. Mr. Burnat’s was not the only camera present at these protests, but the footage he shot, which is accompanied by after-the-fact voice-over narration and part of a video diary of his daily life, is especially poignant and intimate.

Photo

Emad Burnat, co-director of “5 Broken Cameras,”about his life in a Palestinian village that has protested Israel’s security fence; his cameras were often broken in the violence.Credit
Kino Lorber Films

He and Mr. Davidi, a Jewish Israeli filmmaker, combed through hundreds of hours of images gathered over more than five years. In the course of the condensed narrative that results from their editing, we meet Mr. Burnat’s family and his neighbors, sometimes captured in candid moments and sometimes, it appears, acting out such moments for the camera. Or cameras, rather, since the soldiers and settlers are not always happy to be filmed, and it is hard to protect a delicate piece of electronic equipment when rocks, rubber bullets and tear gas grenades are flying.

The encounters between the soldiers and the demonstrators have a ritualistic quality, but the consequences could hardly be more serious. There are injuries — including one sustained by Mr. Burnat himself — and several deaths. Many of these incidents are captured in real time, at close range (in some cases by other people’s cameras), and the cumulative effect on the viewer is an intense, despairing sense of frustration.

Mr. Burnat, however, is more philosophical, even when his pain and indignation are at their highest pitch. He notes the intersection of his family’s life with the ebb and flow of Palestinian and Israeli politics, from the relative optimism of the post-Oslo years in the early 1990s (when his first son was born) to the current era of diplomatic stasis and ideological retrenchment. He lives through periods of anxiety and horror and yet remains attuned to the fine grain of everyday experience, as his children grow up, his hair turns gray, and he has to find a new camera.

In other circumstances Mr. Burnat might fit comfortably into the ranks of artists who use the medium of digital video for private reflection and ruminations on the small epiphanies of daily life. And “5 Broken Cameras” deserves to be appreciated for the lyrical delicacy of his voice and the precision of his eye. That it is almost possible to look at the film this way — to foresee a time when it might be understood, above all, as a film — may be the only concrete hope Mr. Burnat and Mr. Davidi have to offer.

This is not to say that the political crisis that unites and separates them is likely to be resolved any time soon, but rather that, even in the midst of that crisis, it is more than just politics that needs to be seen and understood.

A version of this review appears in print on May 30, 2012, on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: A Palestinian Whose Cameras Are Witnesses and Casualities of Conflict. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe